


Social Media Sales

by lillerson



Series: Six Prompts [2]
Category: No Fandom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-26
Updated: 2018-04-26
Packaged: 2019-04-28 00:57:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14437998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lillerson/pseuds/lillerson
Summary: Prompt: Should social media sites be able to seek your information?





	Social Media Sales

Social media is a precarious medium for expressing yourself. While the concept of compiling a profile of yourself may seem appealing, it can be dangerous to share your personal information on an easily accessible platform. The entire purpose behind social media is to communicate to others, so it fallacious to assume any sort of security for information when one can blatantly expose details without taking precaution.

As I see it, social media platforms are just as such; they are platforms. Users use these platforms to express themselves and/or their ideas. When these platforms come equipped with security options as to what sorts of audiences to which the information can reach, I feel as if that same sort of security should extend to those who collect data for their own specific purposes. To demonstrate, consider a Facebook post. Prior to publishing any post, Facebook allows for the privacy of the post to be altered. One can make the post public-- which allows anybody to see it-- or private, which only gives viewing access to any of the original poster’s friends. Of course, more options exist for the privacy of said post; one can even pick and choose which people can or cannot view the post. Why shouldn’t this principle apply to preventing the sharing of data with third party data collectors? 

In posting something publically to social media, one should inherently consent to that data being collected because everybody can access it anyway. If the post is made any sort of private, it should automatically disqualify it from being collected.

On the topic of the sale of data, however, the publicity of any public post essentially demonetizes it, as anybody could view it anyway.


End file.
